Tag Archives: Classic Editor

The Gutenberg project is a fundamental shift for WordPress. We recognise that there will be a transition period as everyone adjusts to building plugins, themes, and sites using these new tools. To ease the transition for businesses and entrepreneurs, it’s been mentioned that the Classic Editor plugin would be maintained into the future. To give everyone more clarity on how long that’s likely to be, we’d like to add a date to how long the Classic Editor plugin will be supported.

The Classic Editor plugin will be officially supported until December 31, 2021.

During that time we will make sure that Gutenberg works seamlessly with existing WordPress infrastructure. That could include tools for testing and updating code, tutorials and additional documentation, or new compatibility layers. What is eventually created will be based on community feedback.

Since the Classic Editor plugin is central in this transition, we are considering including it with upgrades to WordPress 5.0. New WordPress installs would still add it manually, and we’ve included it in the Featured Plugins list to increase visibility. If you have thoughts on this idea, please leave a comment.

Q&A

What does “officially supported” mean? It will be guaranteed to work as expected in the most recent major release of WordPress, and the major release before it.

Can this date be extended? In 2021 we will evaluate continuing maintenance of the plugin, based on usage. We expect continued maintenance to be fairly trivial.

Will other fallbacks (for example, Custom Post Types, or Meta Boxes) work in Core for the next three years? While it will still be possible for CPTs and Meta Boxes to be marked incompatible with the block editor, future WordPress releases will move this functionality to the Classic Editor plugin. When this happens, WordPress will recommend that site owners install and activate the Classic Editor plugin when a fallback is triggered.